JWG

solving the pairing of socks problem

It is such a pain to have to pair up socks after doing laundry. There are a number of solutions to the problem - some elegant, and some not so.

1. Buy a huge number of identical pairs of socks to replace all your current socks.

2. Just don't care if you wear unmatched socks (this is doubly inelegant).

3. Get a lot of safety pins and pin together each pair when you take them off. (I once bought some socks that had snaps on them; this had the additional attribute of creating a left sock and a right sock out of each pair.)

4. Throw out or give away each pair of socks as soon as you have finished wearing them.

5. Have only one pair of socks and wash them each night when you remove them.

6. Don't wear socks.

7. Get lots of small mesh bags and place a pair in it's own bag when you remove them before you throw them in the laundry basket.

8. Attach the two socks with a long cord which goes up and down your pants legs. (Requires the correct order of dressing which isn't so easy in the morning when you are half away; doesn't work well with shorts or skirts.)

9. Attach each sock to the corresponding pants leg and change socks and pants each day. (Saves the trouble of matching up sock colors with pants each time you get dressed; doesn't work well with shorts or skirts.)

When I was a kid, my mum got a needle and various coloured threads and sewed a few stitches on each sock, two with a red swatch, two with a blue, and so on. This way she was able to mate up the socks. I did it myself through college, then decided it was a bore. Now I match 'em as best I can, but sometimes if the electric lights aren't bright enough, I end up with a dark blue and a black sock. Not so embarrassing now that I don't wear birkies every day.

Kent & I use method #1 for the most part. When we buy socks, we might each buy 10 pair: our socks would all be of the same style/size/type but his chosen style would be different from mine so we could differentiate them. Of course, this still doesn't stop him from raiding my sock drawer on occasion...

I sort of do #1, but of course the socks won't wear evenly, and I don't know that I want to stay with the current style (i.e., buy more of those to refill the pool as socks get tossed due to holes) even if I could easily find more of them, and I don't want to just obsolete dozens of socks that are still good. (I suppose I could hunt down a charity or something for that last issue.)